Is Valve Looking at the ‘Big Picture?’
So I was in the middle of writing a new blog post about how Valve has turned their Steam sales into games, and how that goes along with my previous post about how Steam is a service first and a store second. But then remembered seeing an article saying that Valve had announced that Steam had 100% growth since last year, so I went and read it since I figured there would be some useful information in it to help me support my argument.
It did, but there was a quote in it from Gabe Newell (Valve’s co-founder and president,) that seemed to slip by everyones notice:
“Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house.”
It initially slipped my notice as well, since from the sounds of it it seems like they are just making it easier for PC gamer’s to better navigate Steam when they are using very large monitors. Which is a pretty niche group to do something for.
If you really think about this you’ll realize that PC monitors really don’t get that large, at least not large enough to warrant a whole UI update. The only PC “monitors” that get that large are TVs when you hook a PC up to them.
So is Valve just making the UI for home theater PCs? Or are they maybe working on the UI for something else? Like maybe for a console?
I’d like to think so, especially considering how Steam is currently sort of on the PS3. I would really like to see Sony just let Valve handle PSN since they’ve never really managed to do anything with it, but that seems unlikely unless Sony were to buy Valve.
What seems most likely though is perhaps a Valve/Steam branded PC for your living room, which would certainly open up their potential user base beyond just the PC gamers they have now.
